The British Library's decision to convert three of its
public reading rooms into commercial workspaces is far more than an argument
about the internal organisation of a building in St Pancras. It raises the
fundamental question of what remains of the principle that access to knowledge,
scholarship and culture should constitute a public right rather than a
commercial opportunity. The UK's national library, which holds more than 170
million items, plans to repurpose its Science and Social Sciences Reading Rooms
into flexible workspaces available for hire by workers and businesses for
coworking, collaboration and meetings. The changes form part of the library's
six-year Growing Knowledge: A Refocused Strategy for 2026–2032. The new
workspace is scheduled to open in 2028, while science and social science
research services are to be transferred to the institution's remaining eight
reading rooms.
The scale and significance of the decision should not be
understated. The British Library currently has 11 reading rooms in London, where
adults with a free Reader Pass can consult collection material or undertake
personal study. The library itself describes them as quiet, dedicated spaces.
Three of these rooms are now to be withdrawn from their existing function. What
appears from management's standpoint as an exercise in rationalisation
represents, from society's standpoint, a transfer of space from public
intellectual use to commercial exploitation.
The opposition that has followed is therefore entirely
justified. But the transformation cannot adequately be explained as an
inexplicable failure of judgement by the library's executives. The
commercialisation of the reading rooms represents the logical development of a
policy pursued since the beginning of austerity: reduce public funding, compel
institutions to increase self-generated income, commercialise their assets,
suppress the real wages of their employees and then present each successive
retreat from universal provision as an unfortunate necessity required to
protect what remains.
What is being transformed is not simply the British
Library's floor plan. It is the conception of what a national cultural
institution should be. The plan was announced to library users on 21 October.
Readers were told the Science and Social Sciences Reading Rooms would be
repurposed as flexible workspace, giving the library a new revenue stream. The
proposed facilities would be available to businesses and workers for coworking,
collaboration and meetings. Management argues that the revenue generated will
be reinvested in the institution and help keep its "core services
free".
Within this seemingly innocuous formulation lies the entire
logic of cultural austerity. The public institution is no longer funded because
society considers its activities intrinsically necessary. Every part of it must
increasingly demonstrate its economic utility. Space devoted to scholarship
becomes space that could generate rent. What generations previously understood
as public provision appears on the managerial balance sheet as an asset from
which it extracts insufficient revenue.
The argument that charging for one part of a public
institution will protect free access to another is one of the oldest
justifications for marketisation. The commercial measure is never presented as
the beginning of privatisation. It is described as the mechanism through which
public provision can supposedly be saved. But once the principle has been
conceded, there is no obvious stopping point. If three reading rooms can be
commercialised to protect eight, why should a fourth not eventually suffer the same
fate? If declining usage establishes the legitimacy of commercial conversion,
then every reduction in attendance caused by declining services can itself
become an argument for further contraction.
Researchers have reacted angrily. Simon Harley, an associate
fellow of the Royal Historical Society, questioned why the British Library was
embarking on a long-term commercial plan when services had not yet been
completely restored following the catastrophic 2023 cyberattack. He pointed in
particular to digitised First World War material that remained unavailable.
James Crossland, professor of international history at Liverpool John Moores
University, described the library since the cyberattack as travelling down an
"enshittification road". At the same time, Oxford ancient historian
Georgy Kantor characterised the workspace proposals as "utterly
horrible".
Margot Finn, vice-president for research and higher
education policy at the British Academy, adopted a more accommodating position.
She argued that the cyberattack had severely affected the library's reserves
and user base, and that extracting revenue from reading-room space might be
necessary to preserve the institution, provided specialist staff were relocated
appropriately.
The argument demonstrates how deeply the assumptions of
austerity have penetrated cultural debate. The political question quickly
becomes which portion of a diminished institution must be sacrificed to
preserve what remains. Almost no one asks why one of the world's greatest
research libraries should be required to cannibalise its own research
facilities to remain financially viable. Workers' reaction has been
considerably sharper. Noel McClean, deputy general secretary of Prospect, told
Times Higher Education that union members were "furious" about the
proposed conversion of the reading rooms as well as a separate proposal to
outsource security. He said the repurposing of research facilities went against
the institution's central function of providing access to the national
collection. Prospect called for the plan to be halted and warned that it could
move towards a ballot for industrial action.
PCS said it is simultaneously in dispute with management
over the reading rooms, security outsourcing, and the 2026–27 pay offer. The
union expressed concern about the possible consequences for services and
employment and opposed the transformation of public research space for
commercial purposes. This opposition matters because commercialisation cannot
be separated from the conditions under which the library's workforce is
expected to operate.
The origins of the present crisis trace directly to the
austerity programme implemented after the financial crash of 2008. On 20
October 2010, Conservative Culture Secretary Hunt wrote to the library's then
chair Baroness Blackstone outlining its settlement under the Cameron-Clegg
coalition's Spending Review. The library's resource grant-in-aid was to be cut
by 15 per cent in real terms by 2014–15. But the letter contained another
instruction whose significance becomes especially clear in retrospect: the
British Library was explicitly instructed to "pursue ways to increase its
self-generated income". The government also promoted philanthropy,
corporate support, and increased private funding for cultural institutions.
The genealogy of today's reading-room scheme could scarcely
be clearer. In 2010 the state reduced the resources made available to the
national library and instructed it to increase commercial income. Sixteen years
later, the institution proposes renting public research space to private
businesses to generate precisely that income. What was originally presented as
emergency austerity has hardened into the normal method of administering public
culture.
The British Library is only the most prominent example of a
much wider destruction of cultural infrastructure. In 2020, CILIP reported that
annual revenue funding for local public libraries had been reduced by £243
million in real terms since 2010. CIPFA calculated that spending on libraries
fell by 29.6 per cent between 2009–10 and 2018–19, alongside reductions in paid
staff numbers and increased reliance on volunteers. The deterioration of the
national library must therefore be understood as part of an assault extending
through local libraries, museums, archives, universities and the broader
cultural infrastructure.
Into this already weakened situation came the catastrophic
cyberattack of October 2023. The Rhysida ransomware group penetrated the
British Library's systems, exfiltrated enormous quantities of information, and
caused extensive disruption. The attackers exfiltrated about 600GB of data,
which was later published after the library refused to pay the ransom.
The financial consequences were severe. A 2026 analysis put
the recovery costs at at least £7 million, representing more than 40 per cent
of the library's unallocated reserves. The institution itself continues to
describe the restoration of its systems as a rebuilding process necessitated by
the scale of the attack. EThOS records were restored in July 2026, while the UK
Web Archive returned in October.
But the cyberattack cannot legitimately be invoked to
obscure the policies that preceded it. Commercialisation had been written into
the library's funding arrangements more than a decade earlier. The attack did
not create the underlying policy. It greatly intensified the financial
consequences of an existing one. An adequately funded national institution facing
such an attack should have had the resources for complete reconstruction.
Instead, the financial consequences have reinforced demands that the library
generate additional income. In this way, the extraordinary damage produced by a
criminal cyberattack has become another pressure pushing a publicly funded
institution towards commercialisation.
The workforce has borne much of the cost of this prolonged
crisis. PCS has pointed out that British Library employees received a 3 per
cent pay award for 2023–24 when other public-sector workers received 5 per cent
under the Civil Service Pay Remit. The conflict erupted into strike action in
2025 after management originally proposed a 2 per cent increase, which was subsequently
marginally raised. PCS members voted 98.23 per cent for strike action on a
turnout of 75.17 per cent. More than 300 workers were expected to participate.
From 27 October to 9 November 2025, more than 300 PCS
members struck at the British Library. The union reported strong public
support, and its membership at the institution grew during the dispute. Further
industrial action followed in December, when security workers closed all the
reading rooms.
At the same time, PCS challenged proposals for a
senior-management restructuring that would have added £5,000 in annual
remuneration for directors. Management subsequently abandoned the proposed
restructure. The episode laid bare the class reality hidden beneath appeals for
institutional sacrifice. Restraint operates differently depending upon one's
position within the organisation.
The six-month dispute was ended in February 2026 when PCS
members endorsed their branch executive's recommendation to allow management's
revised pay offer to be imposed. The resulting settlement included a
consolidated increase of 4 per cent for grades A and below, the London Living
Wage for workers earning below the threshold, an additional £2,000 uplift for
Grade C minimums, and a review of allowances affecting security staff. But PCS
itself acknowledged that the settlement remained below its national pay claim.
General secretary Fran Heathcote admitted that it was "not everything our
members deserve", while the demand for full restoration of the 2023–24 pay
loss was carried into the next negotiating round. [pcs.org.uk]
The importance of that episode lies not only in the pay
figures. Library workers demonstrated considerable determination and won
widespread public backing. But the underlying funding crisis was untouched.
Less than a year later, workers confront new attacks involving pay, outsourcing
and the threatened commercialisation of the very reading rooms that security
workers succeeded in closing during the earlier struggle.
The controversy has consequently touched a nerve extending
far beyond professional academia. Writing in the i on 2 November, Lucy
Mangan described libraries as among the last places in contemporary society
that can be used freely by anyone. Her argument centred upon the library as a
public good and upon the importance of quiet, freely accessible intellectual space
in an increasingly commercialised society. She noted both the decline in the
library's real public funding since 2010 and the extraordinary financial
consequences of the cyberattack.
Much of this outrage is justified. The reading room
possesses significance precisely because it stands partially outside the
everyday logic of commercial life. One does not have to purchase coffee every
hour to justify occupying the chair. There is no admission charge based upon
the ability to pay. The independent historian can work alongside the university
professor, the pensioner beside the postgraduate student, the ordinary reader
beside the professional scholar. Whatever inequalities exist outside its doors,
the reading room's formal principle is that access to accumulated knowledge
should not depend on wealth.
But liberal outrage reaches its limits when it refuses to
confront the economic relations producing the destruction it laments. The
commercialisation of the national library is not fundamentally the product of
managers who have temporarily forgotten the institution's purpose. Management
acts within financial conditions created through government policy. Its
calculations concerning revenue, floor space and commercial opportunity are the
administrative expression of political decisions about what should and should
not receive public resources.
Appeals to management to remember what a library is for,
therefore, mistake the symptom for the disease. The question is not whether
executives possess adequate cultural sensitivity. The question is why
organisations supposedly devoted to public provision are compelled to behave
increasingly like businesses.
The issue now falls directly to the Labour government of
Andy Burnham, who became prime minister on 20 July 2026 after becoming Labour
leader on 16 July. Burnham had previously served as Culture Secretary, as well
as Health Secretary and Chief Secretary to the Treasury. On entering Downing
Street, he promised what he called a "new economic model", greater
public control over essential services and action on the cost of living. The
developing crisis at the country's national library provides one concrete test
of what such declarations mean.
If the supposed break with the politics of the previous
period leaves intact the financial mechanisms that compel public institutions to
commercialise themselves, then nothing fundamental has changed. Austerity is
not overcome by changing its vocabulary. Nor does public provision cease to be
marketised because the government responsible describes itself as progressive.
The defence of the British Library therefore demands more
than cancellation of one particularly objectionable scheme. No reading room
should be transformed into commercial office space. No outsourcing of security
or other services, and no job losses from management reviews. The losses
suffered by employees through below-inflation settlements should be restored, and
sufficient public resources must be provided to complete the reconstruction of
the technological infrastructure damaged by the cyberattack and expand, rather
than contract, access to the collections.
The same principle must apply to the libraries, museums and
archives across the country that have endured years of cuts. Defending the
British Library cannot be separated from restoring Britain's wider cultural
infrastructure. Local libraries cannot survive long-term on declining budgets,
volunteer labour, and reduced opening hours while the national institution
itself moves further towards commercialisation. What is required is not another
round of managed decline but a vast expansion of publicly financed cultural
provision.
The inevitable response will be that the necessary resources
do not exist. That assertion has provided the ideological foundation of
austerity since 2010. Every reduction is pronounced unavoidable, every closure
regrettable and every commercialisation pragmatic. Debate is restricted to
deciding which service will be sacrificed next.
But Britain has not become an impoverished society incapable
of maintaining libraries. What has changed is how it distributes its resources
and the social priorities that govern their use. Vast private wealth exists
alongside the degradation of public institutions. The problem is not an
absolute shortage of social resources but how those resources are organised around
the requirements of private accumulation.
This is why the reading room possesses a significance
extending far beyond its physical dimensions. From the market's standpoint, a
reading room can appear economically unproductive. A researcher may occupy a
desk for six hours while consulting an obscure political pamphlet, scientific
journal or seventeenth-century manuscript without producing a penny of
immediate income. Yet that supposedly unproductive activity embodies the entire
purpose of a research library.
Human knowledge cannot be valued according to the immediate
financial return generated by its study. The reading room represents space and
time partially liberated from the commodity relation. Its value lies precisely
in the fact that a reader does not have to justify occupying a desk through
consumption. It recognises, however incompletely, that intellectual activity has
a social value that cannot be captured through a commercial transaction.
That is why the proposal to convert part of the British
Library into rentable workspace is so revealing. It substitutes another
principle of value. Public space becomes financially suspect precisely because
it does not generate sufficient income. Commercial space acquires legitimacy
because somebody can be charged for occupying it.
Once this principle is accepted, no secure boundary can
remain around the rest of the public institution. Every room, collection,
service and employee becomes subject to the question of economic return.
Marketisation proceeds not necessarily by the spectacular privatisation of the
entire institution but through the gradual colonisation of its functions by the
methods and priorities of the market.
Consequently, the Growing Knowledge: A Refocused Strategy
for 2026–2032 contains an extraordinary contradiction. The strategy rightly
emphasises the importance of trusted knowledge and describes the library's
custodial responsibility for its enormous collections as fundamental to
scholarship and research. At the same time it emphasises generating revenue to
reinvest in those priorities. The danger is that the second imperative
progressively devours the first.
Knowledge does not grow simply because collections become
larger. It requires librarians, archivists, cataloguers, conservationists,
technicians and specialist reference staff. It requires functioning digital
infrastructure and searchable catalogues. It requires adequately paid workers
possessing the time and security necessary to develop professional expertise.
And it requires spaces in which people can study without paying by the hour for
the privilege.
The enormous scientific and technological capacities of
contemporary society should permit the opposite of what has occurred. Digital
technology makes possible the unprecedented democratisation of historical,
cultural and scientific material. Public investment could extend opening hours,
increase staffing, restore damaged digital archives, accelerate digitisation,
and give researchers worldwide access to enormous quantities of material
previously available only to a relatively small number of specialists.
Instead, one of the world's great libraries is calculating
how much of its physical research space it can transform into a source of
revenue. That contradiction is not principally technological or managerial. It
is social. The defence of the British Library consequently becomes inseparable
from a broader political struggle over who controls society's wealth and for
what purposes it is used. Library workers have already demonstrated their
willingness to fight. The task now is to connect their struggle with readers,
researchers, students and workers defending other cultural and public
institutions rather than allowing each dispute to remain isolated within the
deteriorating financial circumstances of a particular organisation.
Three reading rooms might appear insignificant beside the
immense crises confronting Britain and the world. They are not. Small struggles
over public institutions frequently illuminate far larger social conflicts.
What is being decided at St Pancras is whether another part of the social
sphere historically removed from direct commercial calculation will be
surrendered to it.
The books are not commodities waiting for sufficiently
profitable readers. Researchers are not customers whose social value can be
measured by what they spend. Reading rooms are not underperforming real estate.
The British Library is not a landlord. It is a national institution entrusted
with an immense portion of humanity's intellectual inheritance. Its collections
and the facilities required to use them should be publicly financed and freely
accessible. Knowledge accumulated over centuries should not have to constantly
prove its commercial profitability before society permits people to study it.
The struggle over the reading rooms is ultimately a struggle
over that principle. Whether culture will be allocated according to
profitability or human need, whether knowledge will be regarded as commercial
property or social inheritance, and whether institutions created for public
enlightenment will remain genuinely public at all.
That is why defending the British Library matters. It is
part of the wider struggle against the subordination of every aspect of social
and intellectual life to the market, and for the socialist principle that humanity's
accumulated cultural and intellectual wealth belongs not to those capable of
monetising it, but to everyone.
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